Headline Roundup • June 30th, 2021
NYC Mayoral Election Board Wrongly Counted 135,000 Test Ballots
Summary from the AllSides News Team
New York City's Board of Elections (BOE) said Tuesday evening that there was a "discrepancy" in its calculation of ranked-choice votes, and that 135,000 test ballot images had been included in the count. The board said it removed the test votes and will re-upload the correct election results Wednesday evening. After election day last week, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams had nearly 32% of the vote, while Maya Wiley, former counsel to current Mayor Bill de Blasio, had 22%. Tuesday's update, which has since been removed, showed Adams was at 51.1%, while former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia held 48.9%. The Tuesday update also excluded around 125,000 absentee ballots, which will be counted next week. Adams said in a statement, "It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time." Wiley called the mistake "the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed.”
The story received wide coverage from across the spectrum. Some outlets pointed to the mistake as an example of wider problems with the U.S. election system and highlighted some Americans' lack of faith in it.
Featured Coverage of this Story
New York Times (News)
Today, probably “later this afternoon,” according to a spokeswoman, the New York City Board of Elections will post new primary election returns, tabulated according to the rules of ranked-choice voting.
If all of this feels like déjà vu, that’s because this will be the second day in a row that the Board of Elections will have run the ranked-choice voting algorithm.
Yesterday, the Board ran the algorithm, posted the results, and then, following hours of comments from mayoral candidates and questions from reporters, abruptly took them down from its website, acknowledging on Twitter it...
USA TODAY
The New York City mayoral election was thrown into disarray Tuesday night after the Board of Elections acknowledged a "discrepancy" in the calculation of ranked choice votes, showing 135,000 "test" votes had been added into the count.
The race between Brooklyn borough President Eric Adams and his rivals appeared to narrow significantly after the partial results were released Tuesday afternoon, but hours later the Board removed the tally from its website and said there were issues with it.
Approximately 135,000 additional votes, added into the Board's computer software for testing purposes, were never removed before...
National Review (News)
The New York City Board of Elections called for “patience” from candidates and the public after discovering a “discrepancy” in the latest vote tally of the Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday — before abruptly removing the data from its site.
“We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial [ranked choice voting] round by round elimination report,” the BOE said in a statement on Twitter. “We are working with our RCV technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred. We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have...
